Spring’s Trap
Every April we become completely delusional.
This is not an insult, it’s sad. Technically S.A.D or Seasonal Ambition Disorder. Somewhere between that first warm afternoon and the moment you realize you can open a window without freezing to death, a small but powerful thought creeps in: Perhaps I can do things this year that I failed to do last year. Or the year before that. Or the previous year. Perhaps. Perhaps? Perhaps!
Spring has extraordinary marketing.
It starts with the light changing. Suddenly the days lengthen and the house looks less like a winter bunker and more like a place where a person with ambitions might live. You notice the dust that’s been accumulating in alarming quantities and conclude this is the perfect moment to reorganize the entire kitchen, learn to grow vegetables, and finally become someone who hosts casual outdoor dinners involving skewered proteins and singular crimson artisanal hydration cylinders.
It’s followed by the changes in color. Those gray sticky things in the back yard are suddenly blanked in green. Little pokey things pop up from the soil, waiving their colored bits around. You are mesmerized. April, ever the carnival barker, drops her voice and whispers “anything is possible.”
So, you buy seeds.
The seed packets are persuasive in ways few things are anymore. The labels show plump tomatoes and aristocratic lettuces, the sort of vegetables that appear to have no self-esteem issues at all. They practically dare you to try to kill them. The instructions imply that all one must do is place a few hopeful specks in the dirt and wait for the abundance. There is no mention of squirrels, mildew, or the mysterious gardening phenomenon known as ich have es mit Wasser getötet, which roughly translates to “did I kill it with too much, or too little water?”
Then, you move on to nesting.
You move furniture. Not because the sofa is objectively in the wrong place, but because the sunlight has shifted, your monstera is scorching, and now you feel that the entire living room must be reconsidered. You buy flowers for vases you no longer own. You clean out drawers that have not been opened since the aughts. You consider organizing your spice cabinet. Alphabetically.
You cook differently too.
Winter cooking is defensive: soups, roasts, things that simmer for hours, steam up the house and become forms of emotional support. Spring cooking is more aspirational. Suddenly there are salads with herbs, vegetables that have been “lightly dressed,” and dinner choices that include the phrase “should we eat outside?” (Optimism at its finest if you live in Richmond, since April weather is wildly unpredictable.) Still, the lure of dining al fresco after burning something on the gas grill that could have been cooked to perfection in the oven is hard to resist.
But optimism is the point.
Spring is the only season that encourages overconfidence. January tries, of course, but its optimism is corporate—goals, resolutions, memberships to gyms with fluorescent lighting. April’s optimism is softer and slightly irrational. It involves dirt, open windows, and the idea that maybe this year you will finally understand fresh herbs, and why cilantro isn’t called soapweed. People begin projects in April that would seem absurd in February.
Still, we persist.
Because spring, at its core, is a confidence trick performed by nature. Trees you wouldn’t look at a week ago are now ogled. Gardens wake up. The air smells like soil and possibility. It’s all very convincing, and deceptively easy looking.
And so every April we behave as though transformation is imminent.
We believe we will grow things because things grow. We believe we will reorganize our homes because the world is reorganizing in front of us. We believe we will become the kind of people who embrace hope, since hope is the fabric of the season.
Most of these ambitions will quietly fade by June. The potted herbs in the window may or may not survive. The reorganized drawer will implode again. The garden party might devolve to some beer and pizza dinner with intermittent mosquitoes.
But a few things will stick. Spring optimism rarely changes everything, but it changes just enough. And honestly, that’s probably the right amount.
